My son has been working through the e-papers downloaded from this site, he has been scoring from 69 upto 74, he is finishing some with 8 minutes to spare others he just about completes, seems to have most of the techniques sorted making the odd vocab slip up and odd silly mistake.
I now have two queries
1. How realistic are the e-papaers to the real thing, i.e are they of the same standard of difficulty? and
2.What should we be doing now, I'm concenred that he is quite borderline but am not sure what we can do to improve .

He is yet to do any practice papers at school, so far all they have done is some (limited) technique practice,

thanks very much Patricia, that is helpful, just a couple more queries.
Is there just one pack of NFER verbal reasoning practice papers available to buy?
How often would you reccomend doing the papers?
and is it still worth working on vocab and maths skills at this stage?
Many thanks again, it is great to have you as a resource a this rather stressful time!
Nikki

I arranged for my daughter to sit a mock exam recently at a test centre which used the VR NFER. These papers have the questions arranged in two vertical columns on each page. Distracted for a moment, she completely missed out a whole column i.e. seven questions. She got 76% - if she had answered the missed questions she would have scored up to 90%. Assuming that the real exam paper is laid out in the same way, at least she knows to double check that she has answered all the questions.

the e-papers are also layed out like this, so hopefully my son will find the nfer papers quite familiar, we have cetainly found them very useful. I do find it quite odd that nfer set the papers but don't provide practice papers that cover all the question types??

We have also used the e-papers downloaded from the site, but the typeface and the layout are a bit different. The e-papers seem to have a bigger and bolder typeface, or maybe it is just my old printer....
In my case it is important to get my daughter as familiar as possible with the real papers, as she is prone to silly mistakes. She is now scoring over 90% most of the time but of the mistakes she makes, at least 1/2 are the result of missing questions or ticking the wrong box although she has found the right answer!

We found the IPS books and papers excellent both for learning the technique and practising. We also use CD rom 1 & 3 which has really helped my daughter speed up.

With regard to your earlier posting, it is definitely worth practising maths - my daughter really improved in maths type questions in just a week or so - originally she was getting about half wrong - now she normally gets 100% for those sections. I think vocabulary is more difficult to learn quickly but it is worth looking at the lists in the TIPS section if you haven't already done so and doing what you can in the time available.

The question sheets of The Tutors E papers are almost identical in style to NFER.....however the Answer sheet, although similar is not close enough in style to NFER and S.Daughtrey.[Bright Sparks]

Hence I order them for practice..

E papers

S. Daughtrey [ Bright Sparks]

Nfer

Nou.....your experience with the mock exam proves the point that the child needs to practice in the same/similar format.

Nikki.....its always worth practicing the maths skills....the maths component of the test is relatively easy.....the quicker your child can be at these questions....the more time for 'difficult' vocab.....keep reading out aloud.....play scrabble......use more words in your everyday language.

The Tutors e-papers are the same as The Tutors published papers. However, due to the formatting of the e-papers by elevenplusexams there is a slight variation in the answer sheets.

The published papers are as close to NFER that we could get without breaking copyright rules. But the e-papers are half the price of the published papers because of reduced publishing costs.

When we sat down to write the papers we felt it was important to get the format and content correct, particularly with the overlap of question types across two papers. We were grateful to Patricia for providing us with some "inside knowledge" relating to the Bucks tests.

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